Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday June 17, 2014 @07:25PM
from the conspiracy-theory-activate dept.

phrackthat writes with an update to Friday's news that the IRS cannot locate two years worth of email from Lois Lerner, a central figure in the controversy surrounding the IRS's apparent targeting of Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny. Now, the IRS says there are another six workers for whom the agency cannot locate emails. As with Lerner, they attribute the unrecoverable emails to computer crashes.
Among them was Nikole Flax, who was chief of staff to Lerner’s boss, then-deputy commissioner Steven Miller. Miller later became acting IRS commissioner, but was forced to resign last year after the agency acknowledged that agents had improperly scrutinized tea party and other conservative groups when they applied for tax-exempt status. Documents have shown some liberal groups were also flagged. ... Lerner’s computer crashed in the summer of 2011, depriving investigators of many of her prior emails. Flax’s computer crashed in December 2011, Camp and Boustany said. The IRS said Friday that technicians went to great lengths trying to recover data from Lerner’s computer in 2011. In emails provided by the IRS, technicians said they sent the computer to a forensic lab run by the agency’s criminal investigations unit. But to no avail.

This is a massive conspiracy. The IRS is hopelessly corrupt. We need a special prosecutor and get people under oath. There needs to be a lot of jail time handed out, starting with the vile Lois Lerner.

...and just see what happens when YOU tell the IRS you've "lost" your financial records. Better get that ass high up in the air so you can fully enjoy the insertion of the jumbo-sized pineapple decked out in razor blades.

But the IRS will get completely away with this. It's all theater at that level.

I would say massively smart. A wider selection of the US public now understand how files, projects and details can be consistently hidden from oversight, FIOA, courts, the press and whistleblowers for generations.
With small sets of compartmentalized computers and networks, nothing can be found with any form of system wide 'networked' search.
This keeps projects safe from all US courts, the press with friends on the inside, political parties with friends on the inside, cults, dual citizens helping spies via US front companies or any other group been observed.
A computer at a desk used by one person without the usual network backups can keep an ongoing project a bit more secure from a cleared network wide search.
Past events showed too many trusted/political active courts/bad people can do cleared network wide searches without ever been noticed at the time.
The compartmentalized system as set up is working well, even when detected nothing much is found that seems readable.
Imagine what every other branch of the mil, contractors and gov can work on in the same way without any outside/gov/court issues:)

The blame for this falls squarely on Exchange. It's limit on mailbox sizes forced people to archive to local pst files. This is something that has only been addressed at many organizations over the couple years. They've been planning and testing for about 5 years, but I don't find it difficult to believe that emails could be lost. Decentralized storage of old emails used to be the norm.

It kept a backup of the records for six months on digital tape, according to a letter sent from the IRS to Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). After six months, the IRS would reuse those tapes for newer backups. So when Congressional committees began requesting emails from the agency, its records only went back to late 2012.

The IRS also had two other policies that complicated things. The first was a limit on how big its employees' email inboxes could be. At the IRS, employees could keep 500 megabytes of data on the email server. If the mailbox got too big, email would need to be deleted or moved to a local folder on the user's computer.

I don't think that qualifies as "massively inept," only as garden variety ineptness.

It would not comply with corporate document preservation laws currently required of public companies. Once again, the government is not bound by the laws it creates. If it's good for the Goose, it SHOULD be good for the gander. One set of laws for the peons, a completely different set of rules for the rulers.

Many companies have short data retention policies to help with litigation. If your policy is to only retain email for a year (both in mailboxes and backups), then no court can subpeona anything older. It is a protection mechanism. However, this article shows how inept the IRS infrastructure staff are. No pst files should exist if you have a data retention policy. And if your policy is space saving, pst files should never be stored locally. Does the IRS use low paid GS11 IT people or is it outsourced to HP/I

1. He has, acting personally and through his subordinatesand agents, endeavoured to obtain from the InternalRevenue Service, in violation of the constitutionalrights of citizens, confidential information contained inincome tax returns for purposed not authorized by law,and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights ofcitizens, income tax audits or other income taxinvestigations to be intitiated or conducted in adiscriminatory manner.

Beware of confirmation bias. The question we should ask is how many people who are not "under investigation" have also had their emails lost. I bet it is most of them. This just sounds like typical big-organization incompetence.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Criminal negligence, I don't see how anybody could argue anything else. hell I'm a little itty bitty shop owner in BF AR and when MY backup solution I give my customers, a combination of offsite, onsite, and cloud, is more robust than their IT dept came up with? I don't see how anybody could say its any less than criminal negligence.

It's quite a coincidence that all seven of the computers storing information that Congress is requesting all "crashed" and the emails were lost to seven computer "glitches". Just think of the odds. What an uncanny streak of misfortune. The emails just vanished and the investigation can't continue. Oh well.

Just ignore the fact that the words "crashed" and "glitch" are not technical terms an IT professional would use and only serve to obfuscate rather than clarify how those emails might be retrieved. Those boxes with the blinky lights are just subject to the whims of fate, I reckon.

I can't really fault the IRS for not handing over evidence that would at a minimum would put them out of their jobs and/or ideally behind prison bars. What surprises me is what bad liars they are.

I think you overestimate the IRS's technological position. Several of my friends work at the IRS (low level IT grunts), and their security plan seems to consist of "security through obsolescence", using many outdated programs for most of their daily work.

How does this get -1? I think I would like to hear from people who disagree with this perspective.

I suspect the word "conspiracy" is the problem. A conspiracy has ALREADY been proven in this case. They already admitted to targeting specific people for additional scutiny and persecution. That is conspiracy. The point now is to find out how far up it goes.

They already admitted to targeting specific people foradditional scrutiny and persecution.

Not really, and there really hasn't been any meaningful persecution.

Remember that liberal PAC groups were equally tied up in this andthat 501c3 tax exempt groups are explicitly denied the abilityto make political endorsements. So the Tea Party PACs do not qualifyanyway. Also remember that many FOSS applications were also caught upin the exact same tightening of the evaluations since they could bemistaken for pro-indust

using your position of power to use groups as your personal S.S. division of the political party to silence opposition is the heart of it. Not only did these groups get targeted and never approved, while other parties got rubber stamped without so much as a single question, but they also demanded a list of ALL donors so they could audit their personal taxes as well. This is tantamount to political harassment to prevent anyone from donating money in order to avoid said harassment. This is called EXTORTION UNDER THE COLOR OF AUTHORITY and its one of the most egregious crimes someone in authority can commit. Its no different than a cop showing up and saying that he saw you speeding the other day and you need to pay him to avoid going to jail for reckless driving. Its an absolute abuse of authority. As a libertarian I find any and all parties that practice this intimidation entirely revolting.

I guess you stopped paying attention to this story quite a while ago, which is understandable. They only made that argument for a week or two. They have since admitted wrong-doing, first blaming it on a field office, but later documents showed to orders came from Washington. I don't recall the EXACT numbers offhand, but something like 342 conservative groups were targeted and 4 liberal groups ended up being sent over in the stack. It has now been shown conclusively that the order was to target conservative and libertarian groups. The question now is who gave the order. Nobody active in politics on the left brings up the few liberal groups who got mixed in the the conservatives and libertarians anymore - they know that's not just a losing argument, but one that makes them look like liars when the numbers are mentioned.

"Review" meant a very different thing for groups that had things like "Tea Party" in their name, such as intrusive demands for information on participants and not actually approving any such groups for 27 months [usatoday.com].

In February 2010, the Champaign Tea Party in Illinois received approval of its tax-exempt status from the IRS in 90 days, no questions asked.

That was the month before the Internal Revenue Service started singling out Tea Party groups for special treatment. There wouldn't be another Tea Party application approved for 27 months.

In that time, the IRS approved perhaps dozens of applications from similar liberal and progressive groups, a USA TODAY review of IRS data shows.

It's been well documented that several planning parenthood organizations and ACORN affiliates were rubber stamped without questions as to how many times a day they pray and who were their donors. Questions they actually asked of other groups. In fact they didn't receive a single question. The tea party should have set up fake planning parenthood companies to get automatic free passes.

It's simply wrong regardless. Determining a non profit does not require questions about religious beliefs and/or submitting a detailed list of donors to then turn around and audit them also. This is the US version of the Schutzstaffel and not an accounting firm. There should not be a legal arm, not should they be purchasing hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammo. If someone is violating tax laws let the FBI handle it. It does not require the irs to be outfitted with hundreds of SWAT specialized divisions with tanks and body armor. Wake up before it's too late and you realize that you're a character in Animal Farm.

One progressive group was targeted, and some tea party groups suddenly got approval after the story about it broke into the news. And I do mean suddenly, as in all of them within a week of it breaking--after two years of waiting. If that doesn't scream corruption I don't know what does.

no Tea Party groups were denied their application from what i remember, but at least one progressive group was.

That was exactly the point. The IRS was making demands for data so onerous as to be literally impossible to comply with. They never denied Tea Party groups - but they just never allowed them, either, leaving them in a legal limbo. They instead demanded an impossible amount of documentation from them to "prove" their legality.

The fact that a progressive group was able to submit an application and be denied actually proves the IRS's malfeasance: they were capable of submitting an application at all, while Tea Party groups simply could not possibly meet the IRS's impossible demands for their applications.

delaying approval, and requiring them to jump through hoops, thus ensuring they dont get the status sought and ALSO not denying them is even worse than simply denying them, it keeps their members with the hope that the approval will go through, meanwhile it never does. So while you may be technically correct that none were denied, none were approved either, thats the more important number.

"I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it."

When you start making it "OK" to silence people you disagree with or disapprove of, it opens the doors for people who disapprove of you, or disagree with your views to silence YOU.

We make the acts of discrimination illegal. Not the idea. People are entitled to their own beliefs, even if those beliefs cannot be substantiated with evidence. We counter this with being allowed to hold our own beliefs, which we attest are substantiated with evidence.

When you start telling people that they must believe the same way that you do, you are perpetrating the same crime that religious authority figures commit when they go on holy wars and crusades.

Resorting to hyperbole, like "only a racist would call this thing a scandal.", you are tit-for-tat in line with religious oppressors that claim things like "Only an infidel" or "Only a godless sinner" to justify their actions.

You should read what the IRS Inspector General said [washingtonpost.com]. It was overwhelmingly conservative/tea party groups that were affected, many delayed for so long they withdrew their application (closed down). It was quite secret (internal BOLO requests), it was unlawful (illegal information required before any action could be taken), and it was harmful (many groups folded because of the delay).

At least, that's what the Inspector General said. But I'm sure they are biased against their bosses and shouldn't be trusted...

Apparently you don't have a problem with the politicization of the IRS, to use the Government to attack political opponents. I get that. Most sane and reasonable people do have a problem with it - at least an ethical, if not recognizing that it's illegal and a gross misuse of Government power.

So if I shoot someone in cold blood and you can't point to the text in the law which makes murder a crime, then in your eyes, I didn't actually commit a crime? Here's a clue. Your demand is not only onerous, it is completely irrelevant. Something is illegal or not independent of whether another Slashdotter can point to the exact paragraph of law which makes the thing illegal.

I've noticed that ever since it became popular to play scientist in the climate change debates, that demands for citations have gotten ridiculous.

You should also, you know, READ the original TIGTA report, too. It is very enlightening, even with its admitted flaws. For example, the targeting was still a very small part of the total applications, and the "Tea Party" targeting was also less than a third of all targeted applications.

Read it already, and you're misstating what it says. You seem to be referring to Figure 4 on page 8--that's showing that of the applications that went for special review, about 1/3 looked like they were from "Tea Party" groups. That doesn't really say too much about whether Tea Party groups were targeted or not; of course there will be other applications that look borderline and need more review. What does show that they were targeted is that in a random sample of all applications, all Tea Party-looking gro

This is a massive conspiracy. The IRS is hopelessly corrupt. We need a special prosecutor and get people under oath. There needs to be a lot of jail time handed out, starting with the vile Lois Lerner.

For everyone that wants to jump to protect Obama... keep in mind republicans are likely to win the next election, and they'll have the opportunity to use the IRS in the same way if this doesn't get fixed. I personally think they're all scum.

In the private sector.... it is industry standard that enterprises ARCHIVE every message that goes in and out of their system. They do this automatically, for security and compliance reasons, and they have retention policies that govern the destruction of e-mail, so they can always answer legal requests made of them.

It seems like the IRS has ignored standard minimal industry security standards and found a complete end run around records laws, by maintaining a policy that seems to intentionally avoid

Some companies have taken this in a different direction. They have a "delete all email after 30 days" policy, with no exceptions, except for legal holds required for gathering evidence in specific legal situations.

Having and following a policy are the only requirement. It doesn't have to be a rational policy, it just has to be a policy. A policy of timed destruction, even if it's only a month, fits the requirement, and it helps avoid deep legal fishing.

Having worked in government IT for a bit, I'd say their story is entirely plausible and not entirely unreasonable. How many years of backups should they be required to keep? But hey, don't worry. Congress shall pass laws mandating backups and we will spend millions on tapes to be used once untilsubpoenaed."Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence"

In any case this is some petty, inconsequential, political bullshit we are talking about. Did the extra scrutiny result in a

Yes it did. Those groups missed out on millions in donations during the 2012 election because they were not given their tax exempt status (Donors were waiting for that before giving because it is to take no more than 90 days according to IRS rules). That was the intention.

Whats in the emails is member lists of those that did donate being handed to liberal groups, like MoveOn, so they could harrass those individuals, which they have done. The IRS had no legal authroity to collect those lists, and they also had no authority to give thoses lists out to private groups.

In addition, 10% of people on those lists have been audited by the IRS. Currently the IRS is auditing less than 1% of income tax filiers.

So to sum up, it restricted freedom of speech, encouraged harrassment based on political views, and used the IRS auditing wing as an attack arm of the adminitration. But since it is people you don't like, its as you say inconseqential political bullshit that doesn't matter.

they love the 2 party system.. they both keep selling the bullshit that the other party is entirely evil and they are angels of god. They both suck and ironically are both evil civil right stealing assholes. Where are the outraged persons who hated bush stealing civil liberties with the patriot act? Where is there outrage over the last 6years? fucking hypocrites is what they are... its a shame they can stand to look at their pathetic asses in the mirror every morning.

These are the kinds of people whom solidify in the mind of the protester the need for Violent Radicalization, and in the mind of the Patriot, the need for Terrorism and Civil War. That path invariably ends in sorrow; nearly every revolution and insurrection has resulted in the election of a despot. America is one of the very few historical example of a civil consequence of Revolution, and it's people very much so, despite it's governments best efforts, believe in a higher existence.

I'm not sure they can do that. I think subpoenas need to have a "target" - you can subpoena Fred Smith for any emails he sent; you can subpoena John Doe for any emails sent, and fill in the correct name when you've been able to determine who it is, but you can't subpoena "anyone who sent emails to this address", because you have no way to serve such a subpoena.

They subpoena organizations because the systems are theirs - not the individuals. Hence, the subpoena was directed to the IRS. They also need to be directed to the organizations that Lerner and her flunkies communicated with - the White House, the DOJ & the FEC. Of course, Obama will then assert "executive privilege."

Sorry to repeat myself, but this was a late post to the first incarnation of this story.

Sharyl Attkisson (investigative reporter formerly with CBS) has posted some questions [sharylattkisson.com] that should be asked:

Please provide a timeline of the crash and documentation covering when it was first discovered and by whom; when, how and by whom it was learned that materials were lost; the official documentation reporting the crash and federal data loss; documentation reflecting all attempts to recover the materials; and the remediation records documenting the fix. This material should include the names of all officials and technicians involved, as well as all internal communications about the matter.

Please provide all documents and emails that refer to the crash from the time that it happened through the IRS’ disclosure to Congress Friday that it had occurred.

Please provide the documents that show the computer crash and lost data were appropriately reported to the required entities including any contractor servicing the IRS. If the incident was not reported, please explain why.

Please provide a list summarizing what other data was irretrievably lost in the computer crash. If the loss involved any personal data, was the loss disclosed to those impacted? If not, why?

Please provide documentation reflecting any security analyses done to assess the impact of the crash and lost materials. If such analyses were not performed, why not?

Please provide documentation showing the steps taken to recover the material, and the names of all technicians who attempted the recovery.

Please explain why redundancies required for federal systems were either not used or were not effective in restoring the lost materials, and provide documentation showing how this shortfall has been remediated.

Please provide any documents reflecting an investigation into how the crash resulted in the irretrievable loss of federal data and what factors were found to be responsible for the existence of this situation.

I would also ask for those who discovered and reported the crash to testify under oath, as well as any officials who reported the materials as having been irretrievably lost.

Please provide a list summarizing what other data was irretrievably lost in the computer crash. If the loss involved any personal data, was the loss disclosed to those impacted? If not, why?

The data was obliterated, not taken. Any personal data is gone, and disclosure implies a scenario that didn't happen. In other words no one would be impacted. Keep in mind that this was a personal laptop and not a server.

Who has the "great length"? Obama, Lerner, Pelosi Reid, Jarrett, Levin. They couldn't get a great length between them combined! I pray for a fatal yeast infection and prostate cancer to strike them all!

Senators and Representatives blow like the leaves during elections, but our federal institutions persist. Their executive personnel may turn over, but the organization doesn't.

You can have as many Senate hearings and bluster on CSPAN as you like, possibly even terminate and reappoint senior level officials, but the organizational mission of the NSA & CIA is skullfuckery, treachery and manipulation, and the IRS exists to refill the wallet of the federal government every way imaginable.

What will come of this? Well, a probe into data archiving pract Oh look a tornado just wiped out a town out West and one of the Kardashians is pregnant again. Just a sec, gotta look at Reddit on my iPhone. What were you saying?

that an email on someone elses computer came from the shown recipient ?after all, people could be going to jail, or loosing their pensions: it is not enough to say, hey, lets look at other hard drives; you need forensic chain of evidence.

The Congress should provide a list of all IRS employees under suspicion so that the IRS can lose all their emails and documents from the relevant period. Then, the Democrats will declare the investigation closed and we can move to the next scandal.
P.S.: I got this plan from Harry Reid, Thanks, Harry!

wow, the IRS thing is awesomely ridiculous. All the people under investigation have had computer crashes that prevent their emails from being delivered to the prosecutors. What are the odds?

I can see it now...

Prosecutor: "Give us the emails for Lerner!"IRS: "Uh, sorry, computer crashed, lost his data".P: "Really? Well, umm...I guess that is possible. How about chief-of-staff Flax? I need his emails too"I: "Computer crashed; what a coincidence. We lost his data too."P: "Hmm, well I got four more suspects..."I: "Yeah, uh, let me see that list. Okay, computer crashed, computer crashed, computer caught fire, exploded, THEN crashed and... oh, you're in luck with the last one!"P: "Are you telling me it didn't crash?"I: "No, isn't that great? Too bad the computer was accidentally was destroyed in a bizarre pet hippopotamus incident. But don't worry, hippos are now banned from all IRS offices."

Yes, the IRS still runs Windows XP [engadget.com]. Their systems are an archaic cluster of crap. Remember, the IRS just collects the money but doesn't get to keep it and spend it on upgrades. Only police departments and judges can do that using forfeiture laws.

Of course they do. This is just someone trying very hard to cover their arse.

Simple (unrealistic) proposal for a new law: for every employee under investigation the IRS has "lost emails" for, American taxpayers get a free year to use the excuse, "Oops, I just lost the financial documents for my audit" without any punishment, fines, or further questioning. By my reckoning, we all should have absolute defenses against tax audits until 2021 so far.

Yes, of course they do. And they do regular backups. This story only flies with people who are not knowledgeable about computers in a business environment. Apparently the IRS thought there were enough of those that the people crying bullshit could be made to seem like right wing loonies.

But this isn't a right wing vs left wing issue -- whatever the current administration gets away with, will be fair game for the next administration, regardless of party.

> Yes, of course they do. And they do regular backups. This story only flies with people who are not knowledgeable about computers in a business environment.

Actually, anyone who has handled email admin for a big business knows they have email "retention polices" [d4discovery.com] where they explicitly delete all email older than X days (often just 90 days) except for what each user deliberately saves off. They do it to preemptively destroy evidence that might be used against them. But they never say that, they always ha

Yes, but... he still has a point. If the "computer crashed" story doesn't fly for whatever reason, they might throw a local sysadmin under the bus for "implementing a typical industry email purge policy, not realizing that it's illegal for a federal entity to do so". Watch for that story.

Government is also slow on the technology pickup. The university back home still only keeps emails up to 1 year on their servers (citing space issues) and tells teachers and staff to archive emails if they want them longer. Typically, email hasn't been a "must keep a record of this" on the list of documents you save. The only reason they still have the computers that crashed is probably due to a requirement that they be properly disposed of to avoid leaking out sensitive data, and they just didn't get around to disposing of them.

Fine, sure 3 computers crashed, they were probably way out dated and many computer equipment isn't built to last. How many computers did they retrieve emails from? What percentage of these 3 is of the total?

Well if you read any of the articles you'd note that what was missing in the original story was any email prior to 2011 due to the computer of the employee involved crashing in the summer of that year.

"The IRS was able to generate 24,000 Lerner emails from the 2009 to 2011 because Lerner had copied in other IRS employees. The agency said it pieced together the emails from the computers of 82 other IRS employees."

The IRS said in a statement that more than 250 IRS employees have been working to assist congressional investigations, spending nearly $10 million to produce more than 750,000 documents.

Overall, the IRS said it is producing a total of 67,000 emails to and from Lerner, covering the period from 2009 to 2013.

This is going to be "email of the gaps" because the Republicans are just desperate for a scandal they pin on Obama and gosh darnit Benghazi just isn't sticking!

2 years is a ridiculously short time to "age out" email archives. Especially for an agency that takes longer than that to handle basic interactions. I just got a call last month from the IRS regarding the estate of a relative who passed in 2011. And the IRS claims they have the authority to go back six years for substantial errors so I'd expect them to be keeping their emails at least that long. More realistically, I'd expect them to keep their emails indefinitely. Storage is getting cheaper faster than email accumulates. What does the average person accumulate in a decade? 5 gigs? IRS has around 90,000 employees so that's 450,000 gigs of data give or take. Shit, I've got 32,000 gigs of storage 2' from me. I could expand that to 78,000 by swapping in bigger hard drives. And 144,000 by swapping in bigger drives and adding more ports. That's with stuff I could order from Newegg and assemble on the dining room table. If I went with real equipment, the only limit would be my wallet.

Last company I worked for, had been archiving email for years before I started and hadn't thrown out (or lost) a single email when I left 5 years later. If legal needed something from 2005, they'd give me the particulars and I'd plug them in and the system spit out a compilation of every message that met the specs. I also made an image of every employee's hard drive when they left the company before I put a fresh image on their computer. Just in case they'd stored something important on their local drive instead of their department's server. Only needed that a few times but the cost was so negligible we spent more on donuts and bagels than storing drive images.

Their failure to have a redundant, secure archive of such recent email is either intentional destruction or gross incompetence.

I'm pretty sure that article actually proves my point, but it's impossible to tell, because the very first thing they do is throw up a histogram where they should be using a pie chart. (At least, I think those bars are showing percentages. It's hard to tell because their method of data collection is utterly inscrutable.)

But it looks like the "progressive" groups that were targeted were almost exclusively pro-marijuana groups. You know, progressive groups that are against the current administration's policie

Nice BS AC. Try again. The IRS Inspector General's office stated in a letter that only 6 groups with “progress” or “progressive” in their names were given any scrutiny at all for potential political activity, while 70 percent of “progressive” groups received no additional scrutiny. The letter continued, “In comparison, 100 percent of the tax-exempt applications with Tea Party, Patriots, or 9/12 in their names were processed as potential political cases” and

What about where the emails were sent? The emails that were "lost" were sent to the White House, the Department of Justice (Lerner sent other emails that we know of trying to coordinate with DOJ to try to drum up prosecutions of Tea Party groups) and the FEC to try to target any alleged political speech. Each of these departments should have independent backups and records on each of the recipient's computers.